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Judge Rejects Approval of Engineered Sugar Beets
countertrolling writes "A federal judge has ruled that the government failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of genetically engineered sugar beets before approving the crop for cultivation in the United States. The decision could lead to a ban on the planting of the beets, which have been widely adopted by farmers. Beets supply about half the nation's sugar, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The Agriculture Department did conduct an environmental assessment before approving the genetically engineered beets in 2005 for widespread planting. But the department concluded there would be no significant impact, so a fuller environmental impact statement was not needed. But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets. He said that the 'potential elimination of farmer's choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, or a consumer's choice to eat non-genetically engineered food' constituted a significant effect on the environment that necessitated an environmental impact statement. There's still hope, isn't there? That we can at least get this stuff labeled properly?"
What about Round Up ready Corn?! http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto_and_the_Roundup_Ready_Controversy
that the title didn't say "Judge delivers beet down on the Gov't"
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
It was just modified by farmers over a longer period of time using human (i.e. unnatural selection) to bring out certain traits.
The only difference is in the people doing the modification and the techniques used.
Just like dogs have been genetically modified to produce everything from chihuahuas to great danes.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Now I'm not all that fussy about not eating bio-engineered food. But I think that biodiversity is a Good Thing, and that it's probably a good idea to preserve some uncontaminated stock (the old adage of "work on a backup" applies doubly when you're dealing with your food supply).
Add to that the way a lot of the bioengineering agritech firms love to assert copyright over their "intellectual property" (plant genetic material), whether or not the farmer actually wanted it or if it was undesirable cross-pollination, and I say good for Judge White.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I believe you are confusing organic, food grown without pesticides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food, with genetically un-modified foods.
This is on par with banning sea salt because they came up with a more efficient evaporation process. With the exception of turbinado (i.e. raw sugarcane extract) and molasses, white cane/beet sugar is 99%+ pure. Who cares if the DNA of the plant is different from the previously "genetically modified" breed of sugar beet? Sugar Beet is right up there with modern corn, strawberries and wheat in terms of plants that have been bred to produce 1000x what the plant produces naturally in the wild. There is no DNA in white sugar, and any that was in the Turbanado or Molasses was destroyed in the boiling process.
moox. for a new generation.
I think companies like Monsanto should not be allowed to sue farmers just because the pollen from their genetically modified food crops spread to other fields, Monsanto released the product in to the open air world so it is only natural that the pollen from their products are going to spread to other plants, proving the farmer not at fault...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What I worry about is Big-Ag owning these GMOs and cornering the market. When that happens and a disease strikes the GMO that's it - the end of food. It is putting too many eggs in the same basket. Then there is the whole thing where farmers only end up "licensing" the seed for the one year requiring them renew their license every year - again, of Big-Ag provided seed. Mono-culture agriculture is too stressful. I'm not particularly "green" but this only makes common sense.
This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.
There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)
And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.
All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.
That's fine, the problem which the judge is rightly pointing out is when pollen from GE self terminating sugarbeet plants pollinates a "warty disease filled" heirloom crop of sugar beets, thereby destroying that farmers heirloom strain while he's getting sued by Monsanto for having a 95% match rate in his crops DNA with the patented GE crop.
I don't think many people would disagree. But the solution isn't to ban genetically engineered crops it's to change the law so a farmer can only be sued if he or she can be proved to have known (or had the information to know if they'd cared to think about it) that their seed was actually carrying the trait, and also benefited from the trait (ie it's not like the farmer benefits at all from having beets resistant to a sepecific herbicide if they don't actually spay that herbicide, which would have killed their beets if they didn't contain the trait.)
You can scratch that "safer foods" part - no evidence to support that. In fact, one might try to argue that roundup-ready foods are full of pesticides which is another level altogether from the food modification itself. The other thing is that they are known to go after people who had their crops unintentionally cross pollinated with their proprietary crops.
Their goal is to make money by taxing food, while possibly having a detrimental effect on food safety.
I'm generally the anti-environmental activism type but when it comes to GMO food, there are some serious concerns. Genetic engineering isn't the same as naturally selecting crop variations. It's a whole new game. In some cases the natural barriers that would keep out certain genetic material are circumvented to inject things like pesticide projection that could never naturally make it through the cell wall. Essentially, things are being injected into the dna of crops that could not get in there naturally and then any cross-pollinated crops will have this foreign DNA. Eventually, it's conceivable that ALL crops would be genetically modified. What happens when 10 or 20 years down the road we find that these modifications have serious health hazards but now we've lost all our non GMO varieties? There is little un-biased research done on this issue.
Also check out this documentary, just don't believe everything they say.
"The difference is the methods involved, where people artificially interfere with breeding and natural selection by means of selecting crops themselves or directly cut and paste genes to that effect."
And that's the whole point. You want to be logical, OK. Let's be logical and scientific about it:
History has shown me time and again that giant multinational corporations are more concerned with doing things the PROFITABLE way, which is not necessarily, the safest/smartest/cleanest/healthiest way. So WHY should I believe that ADM, etc. won't do something "bad" to my food, cover it up, and lie about it?
It's not about being a luddite, it's about knowing, from experience, that the CEO of the company in charge of "Engineering the Future of Our Food!" is probably an asshole who doesn't care what impact he has on other people or the environment.
Additionally, I don't know about you, but I gave up on the notion of the "noble researcher/scientist a long time ago. From his (scientist) perspective, his job with the big food multi-national is probably just as soul-crushing as any other corporate gig.
"Should I check those test results one more time? Fuck it! It's Tuesday, my boss is an ahole, I've got to fill out my 10 page quarterly review, and I just don't fucking care right now. I'm going to Chotchkie's..."
Yeah, I want those guys tinkering around with the basic building blocks of my food.
TLDR: You assume there's no reason to NOT trust them, and I say there's no reason TO trust them.
Call me a "green" if you wish but lab results on some of the genetically modified food have shown stomach cancer in lab rats. You think this federal judge ruled against the crop without any reason at all?
If you want a ton of specifics (just too many to list here) about GM food and it's health effects, there's a good documentary (which also covers how farmers get screwed) call "The Future of Food" located at TheFutureOfFood.com.
I see a lot of "it's just sugar" or "everything's genetically modified" arguments cropping up here; it's really not that simple. Plants are surprisingly "promiscuous" (follow this thread for a number of, no doubt, terribly ribald comments on *that* one). Traits adopted by one set of plants can make their way over to others of the same or different species. Depending on what traits are being modified, this can be a bad thing; consider that Roundup resistance in weeds is not just a result of selective pressure, but of the movement of genes from Monsanto's Roundup resistant seed stocks to neighboring plants.
Yes, this sort of "gene flow" happens in the soi disant natural world as well, but, like CO2 production, modern technology allows us to make bigger, more significant differences over a much shorter period of time. Caution is appropriate here.
I suggest you read your own link. "Organic" labelling does not just mean "without pesticides", it also usually includes "not genetically modified".
Unless you happened to live in California for a few years in the 1990s you've never tasted a genetically modified tomato (and I understood they sold quite well during that time).
Unless you were at one point a grad student who engineered them yourself (or worked in a lab with someone who did) you've never tasted a GM strawberry.
If I'm wrong please point me toward where I can buy the GM seed for either of those.
For the record the only GM fruit or vegetable anyone will probably encounter right now would be a papaya from Hawaii engineered to resist papaya ring spot virus, as GM papayas were introduced after ring spot virus decimated the conventional papayas.
The biggest black market in the United States is the sale of unpasteurized milk. It just shows you how far people will go to do stupid things because they think every advancement made by man is bad.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The case you're thinking of involved a farmer who specifically gathered cross pollinated rapeseed and selectively bred them for the Monsanto gene. He wasn't sued for genetic drift.
Oh, and linking to hulu is a real jerk move. They block non-Americans.
Agreed. Looking at the genome of say, rice, you can easily pick out some genes that are most closely related to genes in fungus than in other plants, and presumably arrived via horizontal gene transfer. Not a lot, but that's because most horizontally transfered genes serve no purpose out of context in such a different form of like and would be preserved or spread through the gene pool.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from paying for meat certified not to be from modified stock.
Would you argue that non-Kosher food should have to be labelled as such? If not, why should I have to pay to accommodate your superstitions?
But Judge White said that the pollen from the genetically engineered crops might spread to non-engineered beets.
The United States court system is protecting us from miscegenated sugar beets?
Arguments in favor of genetic purity are no more valid when applied to sugar beets than when applied to people.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
[CITATION NEEDED]
This is human progress. These rulings about genetic engineering are foolish because they defend intellectual property for the expense of feeding people. The problem isn't the genetically engineered crop - its clearly better. The idea that humans should not be allowed to alter genes in the environment is stupid. Genes are altered all the time by everything, whether or not people do it is quite alright because we are not somehow separate from the eco-system.
The problem is financial: it's that Monsanto and others have a habit of showing up on your doorstep with a bill because one of their genetically modified seeds may have blown onto your doorstep. If you modified the laws so that people who GM stuff blown onto their land could just use it, or, if their crops were dimished by the GM, they could sue, then you would not have this problem. It's like that for regular seeds. Why not be that way for anything else?
I'm in strong favor of intellectual property rights, but clearly, intellectual property rights should not trump the rights of land ownership.
This is my sig.
Actually, yes. They are referring to granulated "table" sugar (aka sucrose) when they use the word "sugar". It is a case of colloquial vs scientific speech and definitions.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
That's right, ooh scary - GMO's are a bit scary. No human safety tests were done - ever. Were all just supposed to trust the warm an fuzzy Monsanto would never sell us anything bad. It's just the company who made agent orange.
Now that studies are being done, GMO's are shown to cause increased allergenicity, as well as other problems:
"Animal studies consistently indicate serious health risks associated with GM food, including infertility, immune system dysfunction, organ damage, and increased mortality. Smith warns, "The only published human GMO feeding study confirmed that genes from the genetically engineered foods transfer into intestinal bacteria of humans and that these genes continue to function."
*All* crops cross pollinate. Why should GM growers be held to a higher standard?
Because they're covered by patents.
If you really want crops without any cross contamination, you can grow them in a sealed hydroponic facility.
Exactly. Which is what Monsanto should be requiring of their customers, instead of waiting until cross-pollination occurs then suing for patent infringement.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
None of this is at issue here. It's the bio diversity or future lack of it that is in question, because of what?
The company's aggressiveness in enforcing their patents that's what. Pollen blows with the wind but yet they expect you not to save seeds, not to let it out of your property and things that are just plain impossible. As a matter of fact the makers of the GM corn here should be hit harder than GM beets. If someone saves a seed to replant and it has mingled by accident with another farmers GM corn, they can be sued. So the impact it might have, is to have less species of the plant left to modify in the first place, leading to disaster if there is only a couple of kinds of GM corn left, and the succumb to some disease or something. There would not be something else to use instead if this were allowed to happen.
Also, don't you think a farmer has the right to not use something if he doesn't want to? And..don't think an organism can't possibly attack a GM plant. It needs to be looked at in perspective, not just from the greens being against it for the wrong reasons angle. There is more to it, than that.
Prove the "better" and "healthier" comments, and this whole issue dissapears in a puff of logic. And no, "a press release by a GM company said so" isn't proof.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Forgive me. I've been unclear.
Farmer A plants seeds with a GURT trait like Terminator (nevermind where he got it since the technology was never commericalized). Some small amount of contamination drifts out of his field and into the edge of farmer B's. Those few seeds obviously won't germinate. Farmer B is either forced to marginally increase his sowing density, or use seed from the center of his field, or the center of his property which has no contamination. Either is that great to farmer B (although most people who're preserving their own breeds of crops already use the center seed as pollen contamination has been an issue for centuries, not with GM but just producing mixed seeds (like mutts) that don't carry all the traits of the purebreed), but hardly constitute a threat to his livelihood. And most to get back to my point above, his own seed isn't contaminated with sterility or any such nonsense.
So what? The farmer was just doing what farmer's have done for centuries! Every year farmers would save the seeds from the tastiest/most productive/most robust plants and use them as seeds for the coming years. It is only through thousands of years of this process that we have gotten the crops we have today. Why should a farmer stop using the methods botanical husbandry that have been employed for the entire existence of his profession just because his neighbor decided to stop and use GM crops instead?
Fructose is a monosaccharide and is derived primarily from glucose extracted from corn. While there are natural sources of fructose, corn isn't one of them.
Strawberries and Tomatoes are both listed under "In development."
Just to be clear I'm not saying there will never be GM tomatoes or strawberries, just that you can't eat them today. So while you or others may feel tomatoes today are less tasty than they used to be, the fault doesn't lie with genetic engineering since the ones everyone is eating haven't been touched by the technology.
Thanks for the link though. It's a great resource.
The problem isn't so much the engineering. That's just applying new technology to the age-old practice of agriculture.
The problem is that Monsanto (and others) want to control the rights to the genetic code they produce. This puts them in the position to benefit from the natural spread (through pollination) of their intellectual property. Yes, they produced the code originally. But that code replicates naturally! It's like the New York Times coming after you for licensing fees because you have copies of their photos in your browser cache.
There's tremendous potential for abuse in allowing a company to own genetic code in this way. How long before someone starts secretly creating viruses and blights in order to wipe out crops that happen to be missing a patented resistance gene?
I'm just a dump web guy, and not particularly evil. If I can cook up that scenario, you can bet that it has crossed the minds of executives at Monsanto.
The biggest black market in the United States is the sale of unpasteurized milk.
Little known fact- you know all that gang violence on the US-Mexican border? Milk smuggling.
The concern here isn't over contamination of the end product, but the environmental impact of growing the crop.
And do you know who are you quoting? Here's a subtle hint: their home page has "GMFree" as a part of the URL. Painting "Institute for Responsible Technology" on the side of their building doesn't mean they are actually performing responsible scientific studies.
Their front page is filled with alarmist rhetoric like "Everything you HAVE TO KNOW about Dangerous Genetically Modified Foods" and "Expert Jeffrey M. Smith, author of the #1 GMO bestseller Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette, presents shocking evidence why genetically modified crops may lead to health and environmental catastrophes, and what we can do about it." Does a responsible scientific organization use "Dangerous", "shocking", and "catastrophe" to frame the debate?
Every single paragraph on their site is devoted to anti-GMO propaganda such as "No GMOs" and "Healthy Eating Begins with Non GMO food!"
They're every bit as neutral on the subject as Monsanto. You can bet that any study they quote has been cherry picked to support their position, and that no studies that might show contrary evidence are supported.
These guys ARE the radical greens who hate GMOs because "they're not natural", not because they understand it.
And just to be clear, I'm not employed in the agri-business, but my wife is. She works for an organic grain wholesaler, so I've learned a bit about the industry, and about the people who work in it. Their entire business model is built upon making sure people freak out when they hear the letters "GMO".
John
Have you eaten wheat? Corn? Beef? Chicken?
All of these products were genetically modified by people long before we knew what genes were. In its natural state, wheat blows away in the wind, leaving no food to eat. Mutant strains kept the seeds, and we cultivated those. Mutant strains developed by Borlaug in the 1950s saved millions from death and billions from starving.
Cows are domesticated from aurochs, now extinct. Wild corn is an inch long and hard as a rock.
Everything we've eaten for millenia has been genetically modified for maximum yield and higher efficiency.
We just have different tools now. What if they'd used phenotype selection to create a super-sweet beet instead? Would that be a problem? Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
For the record, I am a vegetarian.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The post you replied to didn't claim that direct gene splicing isn't "natural" (whatever that really means), it claimed it wasn't comparable to cross-breeding and selection.
And you have to admit that the rate of (significant) horizontal gene transfer in nature in food crops, over the period of the recent past, is small compared to the rate of intentional gene transfers of genetic engineering in the same period.
> Eventually Mostanto could create a roundup-ready corn using artificial selection, the same way
> we've been doing it since we dug furrows in Mesopotamia.
OK, now explain how Monsanto could develop GURT by using selection. That would be kind of hard, considering that the trait they want to enhance is sterility? So, yes, all our food is genetically modified, and no, direct genetic engineering isn't just a stronger form of cross-breeding and selection.
> Would that be fine? Is it just the tool that's the problem or is it hysteria at anything that's
> genetically modified and labelled as a Frankenfood by enivronmentalists?
I agree that the unwashed masses are hysterical, but my feeling is that the judge is right. Monsanto have already sued their victim(s) (and won!) in the past when their unwanted technology was passed to neighboring farms via pollen, through no fault of the neighboring farmer. That, at least, has to stop. It's similar to having RIAA sue you for downloading music which a computer worm transferred to your computer.
Don't tell the sugar farmers in Florida and Southern Texas (not to mention all of the sugar beet farmers) that their crops don't exist. It will just ruin their fantasy! Nobody likes a killer of a good fantasy!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
"Call me a "green" if you wish..."
No, but I'm afraid the "woo" may be strong in you...
"...but lab results on some of the genetically modified food have shown stomach cancer in lab rats."
Do you have a citation, maybe to a good published study?
"You think this federal judge ruled against the crop without any reason at all?"
He didn't rule against the crop. He just said that you couldn't claim that there was no significant environmental impact. So an EIS is needed. I would disagree, but I'm not the judge...
Personally, I think he is probably clueless about science.
which seems to be what a lot of the Earth Firsters really want, as long as they continue to reap the benefits of civilisation...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd say it's not only plausible but that it has already happened. Economies of scale tend to work against diversity. That's not always a bad thing (starvation is a worse problem than a non-diverse food supply) but monocultures do expose us to new risks.
*ahem* evolution requires a sort-of "minimum efficiency"* from any species in order to have it survive. This minimum efficiency level is constantly being raised by the competition.
There are multiple phases to any evolutionary process. In the first stage, when the *initial* colonization of a lifeless environment takes place, there is a massive explosion of diversity. But once that initial wave dies out, it only goes down**, as more and more species fail to achieve the minimum efficiency levels. Initially this merely eliminates harmful mutations, but it will start killing entire species and ethnicities within those species soon. Eventually (usually this takes a looooooooooooooooong while though) a "grey goo" type event takes place : some species finds a very efficient process and colonizes the whole planet (since no other species can acquire the energy necessary to stop it).
* minimum efficiency comprises a lot of factors, not just energy collection and use, but anti-getting eaten strategies, anti-parasite strategy, anti-symbiosis strategy ... it is some number that summarizes everything. A sort of inverse "price" on the species' survival, so to speak. Eventually there is no stopping the species with the lowest price.
** in the same way temperature equalizes : there is no single physical law that prohibits that everyone's house just heats itself without energy expenditure. It's just so massively unlikely it's considered absurd. That doesn't mean that all sorts of effects change the required heating level in a house, but on average, the entropy of the solar system can only decrease. Likewise species diversity, once the lifeless environment is colonized, can only decrease.
Hybrids aren't generally sterile.
But first generation hybrids don't generally breed true.
The second generation will have each individual expressing a random mix of traits from ether of the parents. Often individuals will resemble one grandparent more then the they resemble the first generation hybrid.
This is how companies like Monsanto stayed in business until genetic engineering came along.
Finally the low flavor quality of some hybrids is not because they are hybrids. It's because they were selected with shelf life, appearance or size are the primary criteria.
It's the same reason most flowers don't smell as strongly as they used to. You can't put a picture of smell on the package.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You are probably right. There probably would be in an event if there were labels on the packaging. But that would still be stupid, because, look, sugar is sugar. It doesn't have ingredients, it has a specific chemical composition and shape (it's crystal sugar, even says so in the company's name). Sugar from genetically engineered plants is exactly the same as sugar from a natural plant, or a chemical process, or fallen from heaven!
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]